Sea of green

May 25 2PM 85F

This was my first visit in over a month due to a hectic end to the semester and a manuscript revision deadline, so I was in need of some shinrin-yoku. I kept this visit relatively short, just enough to make some quick observations, set up several trail cameras, and sit back and soak in the mandala.

The mandala looks very different now. It's a sea of green. Other colors are largely missing and there's little to contrast the chlorophyll. The plants previously observed like the skunk cabbage in particular, are out in force, blanketing the mandala. Nearly everything is green. The invasive Japaneses stilt grass is abundant but there's also poison ivy, jewel weed, dame's rocket, Poa pratensis, Jack-in-the-pulpit, multiflora rose, and a few plants of garlic mustard too. The ash canopy is in severe decline. It's completely missing from two trees and much reduced in a third.

One of the things that I was thinking about while a sat under the tulip canopy was the nature of suburban forests like this one. We know that trees are good for us both mentally, physically, ecologically, and economically but there are relatively few examples where this knowledge has led to substantial and effective strategies or policies to increase tree cover. I recently read an article that explored this - Nowak & Greenfield (2018) studied over 50,000 paired-date images (1,000 per state and DC) and found that over a recent 5 year period that urban tree cover is declining approximately 36M trees per year or 175,000 acres. Given the benefits of trees, they offer a very conservative estimate that these lost trees cost us $96M per year. Despite the loss of trees, there has been increases of tree cover in areas (but not sufficient to counter losses) through tree growth, planting, and natural regeneration but we may not see the benefits of these increases for many years.